From: | Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> |
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To: | Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> |
Cc: | Andres Freund <andres(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com>, Peter Geoghegan <pg(at)heroku(dot)com>, Pg Hackers <pgsql-hackers(at)postgresql(dot)org>, Ants Aasma <ants(at)cybertec(dot)at> |
Subject: | Re: better atomics - v0.5 |
Date: | 2014-06-30 17:45:52 |
Message-ID: | 12903.1404150352@sss.pgh.pa.us |
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Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> I'm personally not convinced that we're approaching this topic in the
> right way. I'm not convinced that it's at all reasonable to try to
> emulate atomics on platforms that don't have them. I would punt the
> problem into the next layer and force things like lwlock.c to have
> fallback implementations at that level that don't require atomics, and
> remove those fallback implementations if and when we move the
> goalposts so that all supported platforms must have working atomics
> implementations. People who write code that uses atomics are not
> likely to think about how those algorithms will actually perform when
> those atomics are merely emulated, and I suspect that means that in
> practice platforms that have only emulated atomics are going to
> regress significantly vs. the status quo today.
I think this is a valid objection, and I for one am not prepared to
say that we no longer care about platforms that don't have atomic ops
(especially not if it's not a *very small* set of atomic ops).
Also, just because a platform claims to have atomic ops doesn't mean that
those ops perform well. If there's a kernel trap involved, they don't,
at least not for our purposes. We're only going to be bothering with
installing atomic-op code in places that are contention bottlenecks
for us already, so we are not going to be happy with the results for any
atomic-op implementation that's not industrial strength. This is one
reason why I'm extremely suspicious of depending on gcc's intrinsics for
this; that will not make the issue go away, only make it beyond our
power to control.
regards, tom lane
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